ROBINSON CRUSOE: ADVENTURES ON THE CURSED ISLAND

Take on role of one of four characters from the ship crew (cook, carpenter, explorer and soldier) and face the adventure. Use your determination skills to help your team mates, discuss with them your plan and put it into practice.

You will build a shelter, you will build palisade, weapons, you will create tools like axes, knives, sacks, you will do everything you can to… to survive. You will have to find food, fight wild beasts, protect themselves from weather changes…

Search for treasures. Discover mysteries. Follow goals of six different, engaging scenarios. Start from building a big pile of wood and fire it to call for help, and then start new adventures. Become exorcist on cursed Island. Become treasure hunter on Volcano Island. Become a rescue team for a young lady who’s stuck on rock island…

Customer Reviews

As far as cooperative board games go, this is right up there in not only in terms of theme, but also difficulty. There are a plethora of ways players can take wounds: sleeping in open air, going without food, fighting animals without the adequate equipment, extreme weather - the list goes on. However, these difficulties all make sense given the setting, which is to survive on an island whilst trying to complete some kind of objective. Most playthroughs have you constantly hanging on by the skin of your teeth, and having to make tough decisions regarding which is the more pressing concern at any given time in the game. One wrong move will literally cost you the entire game.

As this is a fully cooperative game with no real 'individual' turns, the game also suffers from what some have dubbed the 'quarterback' issue. That is, having one person who is the best at planning, strategising and allocating deciding every move. This gives the other players the illusion of control, but in reality they are often just agreeing with the quarterback's logic.

Despite these issues, the game is a blast to play, and features some thoughtful mechanisms which simulate camping, weather and future effects of certain events. The game features 6 scenarios which are all cleverly constructed and greatly differ from one another in terms of both theme and gameplay. By now, I've only played the first 2 of the game's 6 scenarios (1st scenario several times due to having to introduce new people to the game), and have lost every single game. Yet I still look forward to the next playthrough.

Only by working together is there any hope of your characters lasting to the end of the game. One minor slip and the stress level cranks up as you are desperately trying to heal up enough to get that last invention built to win the game. The problem with stopping to heal is that also means that you won't be able to go look for food, so you are going hungry tonight, which means you get hurt even more.

The game has some clever mechanics that make you choose between dedicating your time and guaranteeing that a task is completed
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split your time, roll dice and risk injury, task failure, and/or some other effect that is going to eventually come back in a later turn and ruin your day. (Posted on 5/09/15)